Chapter 7: Ranking Documents in Online Enterprise Social Network

Social media applications, such as Jive, Salesforce.com, and Yammer, have been widely adopted by enterprises. The importance of a document posted in the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) applications is different from traditional document collections or Web pages. More importantly, it is different from public social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, which view the entire social network as a “flat” graph. In most enterprise social network applications, the documents are organized in a hierarchical structure, which may include “group,” “space,” “project,” and so on. Also, the authors of the documents play a critical role in the importance of a document. In this work, we take advantage of the unique structure of ESN applications to propose a novel method to rate the importance of every document posted in ESN objectively.